The Fight for $15 Comes to the Republican Debate

When an estimated one thousand Fight for $15 protesters gather on Tuesday night at the Milwaukee auditorium where the Republican presidential debate is being held, it will mark the end of a long day of strikes and protests in some 400 cities nationwide.

Fox Business Network, which is hosting the debate, has noted the protesters’ plans in its pre-debate coverage, so questions about them are all but inevitable. It’s a sure bet, however, that none of the candidates will endorse their demands for $15 an hour and unions.

It is also increasingly clear that Republicans reject those demands at their own electoral peril.

The demonstrations on Tuesday were a bold expansion of both the participant base and political message of the Fight for $15. Fast food workers still form the core; the effort began with protests by a handful of fast food workers in New York City in 2012. But on Tuesday fast food workers were joined for the first time by FedEx freight handlers, T-Mobile retail employees, Price Rite retail employees, auto part workers and farm workers, as well as employees of federal contractors, home-care and child-care workers and other low-wage workers who adopted the fight as their own early on. Firm tallies of the total number of participants were not available, but estimates were in the tens of thousands.

Also for the first time, the message went beyond the traditional call for better pay and the right to organize without retaliation. In chants and on social media, the activists challenged the presidential candidates to “come get my vote,” vowing to vote for the candidate who represents their cause – and against those who don’t.

Senator Bernie Sanders joined employees of federal contractors who gathered at the Capitol instead of reporting for work and then staged sit-ins at cafeterias in the Dirksen Senate Office Building and in the Capitol Visitor Center.

Hillary Clinton tweeted her support for the low wage workers taking part in the protests, saying that their advocacy is “changing our country for the better.”

The Republican candidates, in contrast, have yet to even sensibly comment on the obvious need to raise the federal minimum wage, let alone foster unions or take other concrete steps to raise living standards from the bottom up, through better jobs and higher pay.

The protesters are way ahead of them. Fast food workers in New York City and Los Angeles, for whom a $15 hourly wage is already being phased in, protested on Tuesday to draw attention to the fact that their goal of forming a union to collectively bargain with corporate employers is still unmet. Protesters in Selma, Ala. and in Gainesville and Tallahassee, Fla. joined for the first time on Tuesday. Their efforts, along with repeat protests in Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia, were evidence of the effort’s increasing reach into the traditionally more anti-labor south.

The Fight for $15 organizers, including the Service Employees International Union, have pointed out that tens of millions of workers earn less than $15 an hour, even as corporate profits and executive compensation have risen. In addition to the political power implied by their sheer numbers, their real hardships and legitimate grievances have given them moral clout, and they are using it to tell politicians where the nation needs to head. Andrew Cuomo got the message, announcing on Tuesday that he would order a phased-in increase to $15 an hour for state employees. Other governors and mayors and the Democratic candidates have also been responsive. But not the Republican candidates. They should get out more, starting in Milwaukee, where the protesters have come to see them.